1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to the field of messaging and more particularly to message delivery management for electronic messages.
2. Description of the Related Art
Electronic messaging represents the single most useful task accomplished over wide-scale computer communications networks. Some argue that in the absence of electronic messaging, the Internet would have amounted to little more than a science experiment. Today, electronic messaging seems to have replaced the ubiquitous telephone and fax machine for the most routine of interpersonal communications. As such, a variety of electronic messaging systems have arisen which range from real-time instant messaging systems and wireless text pagers to asynchronous electronic mail systems.
Electronic mail, a form of electronic messaging referred to in the art as e-mail, has proven to be the most widely used computing application globally. Though e-mail has been a commercial staple for several decades, due to the explosive popularity and global connectivity of the Internet, e-mail has become the preferred mode of communications, regardless of the geographic separation of communicating parties. Today, more e-mails are processed in a single hour than phone calls. Clearly, e-mail as a mode of communications has been postured to replace all other modes of communications, save for voice telephony.
Modern electronic messaging clients provide a “reply” function which permits the composition of a message by a composer in reply to a message received by the composer. By selecting the reply option, a new message window can open addressed to the sender of the received message. Notably, where the received message had been addressed to multiple recipients in addition to the composer, a “reply-all” function permits the addressing of a reply message to all recipients designated by the original received message. Thus, the reply-all operation can be an efficient mechanism where all addresses of a received message are intended to receive a reply from the composer.
The widespread usage of e-mail has resulted in effortless communications among users. Notwithstanding, the ability to readily communicate with a number of people with little effort is not without its problems. For one, reviewing an e-mail inbox chock full of messages can be tedious when the number of messages becomes excessive. The volume of messages in an inbox can be compounded when many messages are not original transmissions from sender to recipient, but replies to messages previously sent.
In this regard, where one message has been addressed to a multiplicity of recipients, the reply by each recipient can readily overcome an inbox. For smaller e-mail distribution lists, receiving replies from different addressees can be desirable. In contrast, for informational messages sent to a large set of addressees, receiving a reply from a large number of the addressees can supply little added value to the message exchange while undesirably clogging the inbox of the sender. Yet, the addressees of a message cannot be faulted as there is no way to know whether the sender prefers a reply to the message or not.